Spectrum|Splatter

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Jadebloods have always been Damara’s favorite.

Scratch talks sometimes about how it’s a response to the fact that she never had a mother, or a sign that she herself has failed to reject the hemo-castes he’s done so much work to imbue trollkind with, or all sorts of other things she doesn’t understand and doesn’t care about in the slightest. It’s actually much simpler than that, Damara thinks. Jadebloods are the ones that stain her clothing least.

Rustbloods fight like cornered animals, almost all of them. They fight with psychic powers and weapons improvised from furniture and their own horns. Rustbloods don’t stop fighting until they’re well and truly dead. Despite how hard they are to kill, she doesn’t really dislike them — there’s a flicker of pride in “her people” whenever one of them manages to give her something approaching a challenge.

Bronzebloods are less violent than rustbloods, but some of them can bring local animals to help fight her, and they’re unspeakably stubborn. Like rustbloods, bronzebloods never give up. Unlike rustbloods, Damara doesn’t have a hint of a soft spot for them. She doesn’t have to kill them often, since bronzebloods dying is less a political statement and more a fact of life (or death, as the case might be), but it’s a good bit of fun when she does.

She’s strong enough to simply overpower goldbloods, which is fortunate, given how tricky and wily they tend to be. She doesn’t have the mind to fight a goldblood on their own terms, so she’s never tried. A few simple gestures with her needles will take their head off cleanly, and then all she has to do is mark the kill as hers. No need to worry about a complex intellectual strategy or anything like that. The powerful psychics sometimes give her a decent fight, but even they inevitably fall before her might.

For some reason she’s never been able to fathom, olivebloods are the group most prone to trying to negotiate with her. Sometimes they beg and plead, sometimes they offer her anything and everything they own. One offered to be her friend, once, and after she’d killed him she was almost tempted to ask the corpse what on Alternia it thought she’d do with a friend.

Jadebloods are her favorite, because if she can convince them that either they or their children will die tonight, they’ll practically go without a fight. They’re as bad as rustbloods when their children are threatened otherwise, but told to choose between themselves or their children, jadebloods will actually let her kill them much of the time. She gives them nice clean deaths when she can — there’s no joy in tormenting someone who’s martyring themselves. And their blood blends in with her dress so much better than any of the other blood colors.

Tealbloods seem to think they’re action heroes. They leap into action, and she can practically see the mental narration. The dashing hero challenges the Demoness to a duel! Though the battle will be hard-fought- and then she cuts them off with a needle through the torso. It’s kind of hilarious, honestly. They’re not as nice as jadebloods, but they’re a good second place.

She hates ceruleanbloods for fucking with her head. Ceruleanbloods die fast and violently, even if they’re not telepaths — no time to enjoy the terror of someone who knows they’re about to die here, just a quick snap-and-rip and they’re dead and cerulean is spewing like a fountain. Scratch already does enough messing with her head. She’s not about to put up with any more of it than she has to.

Bluebloods are refreshingly straightforward. They’re not usually psychic, and when they are, it’s normal telekinesis-type stuff. Bluebloods don’t try to play with her mind. And since they’re so high on the hemospectrum, she can take her time playing with them — they don’t bleed out fast, and they’re remarkably sturdy. It’s a pretty lousy reward, admittedly, but it’s so much fun she can’t bring herself to stop.

Purplebloods are the worst. They’re as bad as ceruleans about messing with her head, but instead of the simple telepathy, they have their chucklevoodoos. They’re also even harder to kill than ceruleans, which are not generally fragile little flutterbeasts themselves. Damara hates purplebloods with a passion she feels for very few things, and she takes every opportunity to kill them. Scratch has his own opinions on why that is, but he won’t talk about them where she can hear; he just makes “hmm” noises and says it’s about something she can’t understand yet when she asks.

Violetbloods are rare, and usually pretentious, puffed-up twits. But they’re not so bad to fight, really. Too much money, too little clue about what they’re doing. The most impressive weapons money can buy won’t help them against her, but they will provide a very nice light show to fight by. Not quite as much fun as bluebloods to torture, but there’s some entertaining stuff she’s been able to do with their ability to breathe water.

She can’t say much about fuschiabloods, because she’s working from a sample size of one Heiress she’d killed during a duel with the Condesce. That one was nothing special. A scared little girl, dead before she’d understood what was happening. Damara’s made hundreds of kills that were identical except for the color of the blood on the floor afterwards. Fuschiabloods, she concludes, are not very interesting to kill.

Scratch asks her about these things, about her observations of each point on the hemospectrum and their behavior, and he takes notes on them. She hates him for it, in that sort of persistent smoldering way she’s hated him as far back as she can remember. Someday she’s going to kill him, she figures. Someday, but not today.

Today is a new job. Go to this secret meeting of hemoabolitionists, kill all but one, leave that one to spread the legend of the Demoness even further. Simple. She’s done it who knows how many times.

Not bothering to say anything to Scratch, she drops into the timestream to begin her work for the day.